MR. ALLEN: Your new book is called To Save America: Stopping Obama's Secular Socialist Machine, and you have a chapter in here, "Solving the Education Crisis."

"Crisis" is a strong word.

MR. GINGRICH: Well, I think when young Americans realize that they're going to be competing their whole life with China and India. You know, it's not about Indiana competing with Illinois. It is about what do you have to learn in order to be able to have—earn a good living, to be a good citizen, to understand the challenges of your lifetime.

And we have got to fundamentally rethink our school systems, in particular for our poorest children who are truly trapped who are in bad bureaucracies doing a bad job, and as a result, the kids are more likely to end up in prison than they are in college, and—and that's a national tragedy.

MR. ALLEN: Now, charter schools have helped, and vouchers have helped a lot of lower-income students. You talk about a "no limits" charter school system. What's that?

MR. GINGRICH: That's actually something I talked with President Obama about, and I spent time going around the country with Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, and with the Reverend Al Sharpton. We made sort of an unusual trio.

But I believe, first of all, that every child and every parent has the right to know how is the school doing—

MR. ALLEN: And you've—you've—-

MR. GINGRICH: —how is it performing.

MR. ALLEN: —praised the President for that.

GINGRICH: Absolutely. This is the one zone where I would say he and I are the closest to being in the same general direction.

The second point I'd make is that every parent should have the right to put their child in the school that they believe will work for their child, and that means an open-ended charter school system at a minimum, which is where the President is, but nonetheless it's a big idea, an open-ended charter school system where you can create a series of competitive schools, different models, different approaches, different structures, not trapped by the union contract, not trapped by the traditional state curriculum model.

I would go a step further. I think we ought to have a Pell Grant for everyone from K through 12. People talk about vouchers and vouchers is a bad word, but liberals love Pell Grants once you get to college, so why wouldn't they love Pell Grants to get you to college. And I think if—you know, both the Netherlands and Israel use a system where parents have—it's public education. It's paid for by the public, but you as a parent have the right to pick the school you want to go to, and if that happens to be, for example, a Catholic school, that's okay. If it happens to be a school that focuses on math and science, that's okay. If it happens to be a school that focuses on ballet, that's okay. But you have certain standards to meet, and then I think you have a very wide range of how you get to those standards.